thousand years, this theological framework served as the spiritual engine of successive Iranian empires. The Achaemenids first formalized its rituals, and the Sasanians later standardized its sacred texts

Deep in the swampy lowlands of modern-day Veracruz and Tabasco, a people emerged around 1200 BCE whose true name has been lost to time. We call them the Olmecs—a Nahuatl word meaning "rubber people"—due to a twentieth-ce